Comment by osener | Hacker News Reader

Comment by osener | Hacker News Reader

Both Kagi and Orion are deeply impressive products. Even though I try every new general purpose web browser and search engine that comes out, this combo is the only one that stuck.

Orion: Finally a non-chrome based web browser that can compete with the likes of Brave and Arc. It works much better on Mac than the alternatives, with the same engine as Safari it also benefits from deeper system integration such as native Sign-in with Apple and password management. Also, like Brave, comes with powerful ad and tracker blocker so you don't need a separate extension. I also love its built-in tree-style tabs implementation.

Kagi: It is Google without all the bad parts. It is user centric like some other alternatives, without the poor index and search results.

Props to the team, I am looking forward to what's to come. It is mind blowing how a single small company can make one of the best desktop browser AND search engine AND mobile browser on the market. Hope they are not spreading themselves too thin and can fund the development of all these for a long time!

My only complaints are the slow performance of Orion on iOS, and its poor handling of app urls. Latter caused some issues when I had Orion set as the default browser on my iPhone and some payment flow that used app redirects between my banking app and the store app got stuck. I was lucky and I could manually launch the app by pasting the app link in Safari, but I hope it can handle these cases as well as Mobile Safari in the future.

Thanks for the review. I used Kagi for a bit and then forgot about it, time to try it again.

If Orion is based on webkit, what other advantages does it offer over Safari that you found?

I'm not the OP, but Orion supports extensions from both the Firefox and Chrome ecosystems. It also supports the WebRequest API in blocking mode, meaning you can use uBlock Origin, which you can't use at all with Safari.

Oh wow, thanks for highlighting the extensions piece. That's huge! Going to give it a go as well.

Although the extensions will install, good luck getting them to work properly. Even the ones that the browser recommends to install, they are extremely buggy still. I hope one day they’re able to get extensions working better.

That's why it's still in beta. But stable enough for you to use it, as SnazzyQ says.

So is all uBlock Origin functionality supported, 100% ?

I believe that's the long-term plan though last time I tried it (a few months ago) it didn't work for me.

Web Extensions support, built in adblocker and tree style tabs (can be enabled using the option under View menu) are the biggest ones for me.

And the built in tree style tabs are real tree style tabs with indentation, not just vertical tabs like on Edge.

Orion is absolutely amazing.

I wish I loved the browser. It's just close enough to Safari that I use it the same but it's just different enough where it drives me absolutely nuts.

The intro video for Orion is what convinced me.

Is there mention of other OSs for Orion? I can't use it until it works on Linux/Windows, unfortunately.

They've said they don't have the resources for other OSes yet until they can hire more people.

https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-linux-windows-android/5

> Orion browser currently has around 1,800 active users. The way we measure this is through auto-update “pings” to our updates server.

I'm happy for them, but is this an accurate measure of active users?

Next 2 sentences:

>This measures only users who have enabled auto-updates (Orion is zero-telemetry by default so auto-updates are disabled by default). It may not be an accurate portrayal but is the best we got.

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